Correlation does not equate to causation .. at least that’s what my statistics lecturer at university taught me. When I saw some device usage stats come across in my email, I was immediately skeptical.
In this case, is it the larger screens driving more internet use, as contended, or is it more a case that, on average, larger screen phones are more and more prevalent, and thus they represent more usage than less common, smaller phones?
The short answer is – who cares, right? This information shows us something which we intuitively know, but it’s an interesting tidbit regardless. There’s a significant difference in average data user per day between smaller devices (347mb) vs larger (840mb), though the minutes used per day – across all sizes – varies only within 80 minutes or so, and the daily sessions within 50 sessions across the range.
The one thing I can draw from this is that larger phones are being used to consume streaming content – e.g. videos, movies, etc – moreso than the smaller screen Androids.
This information came to us courtesy of Strategy Analytics’ mobile research panel called AppOptix, and it’s a neat little insight into how screen size drives (or may vary alongside) data usage. If you’ve got a larger screen device, chances are you use it more. Stunning, right?
